Billy Kemp

The title, Wag On Weirdos, was how Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma would sometimes close their podcast, The Chinwag. This is post number one for the musical cryptogram composition exploration (mcce) for the Chinwag Bagatelle… Or maybe it could be just- Wagatelle… A bagatelle is a short piece of instrumental music, playful in character. A chinwag is a friendly conversation. Let’s write some music…

A Musical Cryptogram

But before we begin, let’s see what a musical cryptogram is. For our composition we’ll use a system where non-musical letters are turned into musical letters. We can then use those musical letters as a point of departure for our melody. Here is our musical cryptogram.

The musical alphabet are the letters, A-B-C-D-E-F-G, or the first row. The non-musical letters are, H-I-J-K-L-M-N (the second row), O-P-Q-R-S-T-U (the third row) and V-W-X-Y-Z (the fourth row).

Here is an example of turning a word into a musical word. We will spell the word CHINWAG and then turn that into a musical CHINWAG or CABGBAG (only musical letters). In the word CHINWAG there are three musical letters- the C, A and G. The non-musical letters are, H, I, N and W. We’ll take the non-musical letters from rows 2, 3 or 4 in our musical cryptogram and turn them into a musical letter corresponding above to row 1, the musical alphabet, in that same column. For example, the first non-musical letter in CHINWAG is H, which is in column one of the musical cryptogram. When you go up to the music alphabet from row 2, where H is, the musical letter for H will be A. So here is what happens with the word CHINWAG:

So the musical spelling of CHINWAG is C-A-B-G-B-A-G. Here is the sound of those notes or pitches:

In my last post I mentioned that in one of the Chinwag episodes, Paul and Stephen mentioned these instruments that they would like to hear in a piece of music- tuba, banjo, saw, cowbell and bagpipes.

So the musical spelling of CHINWAG would sound like this on a tuba:

Chinwag musical spelling in a close manner

I have played the CHINWAG musical pitches in a close manner that looks like this:

Even if you can’t read music, you can see that the notes are close together and they generally are descending in motion. Look at the red line. We’ll call that the melodic line:

Chinwag musical spelling in an open manner

That close musical spelling of CHINWAG was my first attempt. Let’s try to do a second attempt where the notes are more open. Close and open are the terms we’ll use to describe the melodic line.

Here is the melodic line in an open manner with the line in red.

In two weeks we will take these CHINWAG musical notes and create an opening statement for our Chinwag Bagatelle…

Cheers,

Billy